12 comments:

At this point, I'm figuring that after he loses an early primary/caucus, he will implode. The Republican Clown Car is a little roomier now that Cain is out, so that gives him a chance to spread his legs a little (which is not a thought I want just before eating).

He just doesn't have the discipline. He carries WAAAYYY too much baggage. Some serious right-wing pundits - George Will, Chuck Krauthammer - are against him (Will's wife works for Romney) and will do all they can to keep him from getting the nomination.

It is fun having him around, though. He's like a political Whoopie Cushion.

“You have a very poor neighborhood. You have kids who are required under law to go to school. They have no money. They have no habit of work. What if you paid them part-time in the afternoon to sit at the clerical office and greet people when they come in? What if you paid them to work as the assistant librarian?”

“What if they became assistant janitors and their job was to mop the floor and clean the bathroom?”

~Newt, echoing the argument he first made in November, when he called child labor laws that might prevent the hiring of school children as janitors as “stupid.”

I wonder where he'd get the money to hire poor children to work as janitors in their schools? Or is this to REPLACE the adults who have the jobs currently? At a COST-SAVINGS! The man's a genius!

I don't think that he's going to self-destruct anytime soon because unlike the previous candidates who have done so, Gingrich has been on the national stage for decades. There are no more skeletons in his closet and he's an experienced campaigner.

For a variety of reasons, I'm not going to vote for him, but I might enjoy seeing him debate Obama. From clips that I've seen of the GOP debates, he appears to have done well.

Have you read any of his alternate histories? Days of Infamy was fairly good.

Oh, John, trust me. Skeletons, closets - Newt's got 'em by the score! Shoot, we haven't even heard from the women who were try-outs for each of his future Mrs. Gingrich's.

As for Newt in a debate, considering the whole "People are taking vacations on their Food Stamp money!" nonsense he decided to find in his rectum, I would welcome a debate between Newt and pretty much anyone.

A friend of mine reminded me what Krugman wrote about Gingrich - He's a stupid person's idea of what a smart person sounds like.

That, and having all the discipline of a hound on the trail of a female in heat . . . oh, yeah, all it's gonna take is time.

"A friend of mine reminded me what Krugman wrote about Gingrich - He's a stupid person's idea of what a smart person sounds like."

The irony here is incredible! A stupid person relating what a stupid person thinks of Newt.

As to the child labor thing, from what little I've heard about it, his concern is strengthening or developing a work ethic that might be lacking. I've not heard anyone ask him if he thinks all poor people lack it, so I doubt the graciousness of anyone who would assume such a thing without first asking.

What's truly remarkable is how little true vetting is done in slamming this guy as there was in worshiping Obama.

Gingrich's comments on child labor laws were inflammatory, but it's worth exploring the trade-offs between a teenager getting a terrible education and work experience and a teenager getting a terrible education and no work experience. Kevin Williamson:

Gingrich was right to say that the real value of a first job isn’t the money one earns but the lessons one learns: how to show up on time, how to be honest, how to be dependable, how to take direction, how to separate one’s personal life from one’s professional obligations, etc. Having fewer 16-year-olds working as part-time janitors does not mean that you will have proportionally more of them fine-tuning their Harvard admission essays. Having more 16-year-olds working as part-time janitors does not mean that we will have proportionally fewer rocket scientists and Ezra Pound scholars down the road. Most of our young people aren’t headed down that route. [...]

There are always economic tradeoffs, of course. But the alternative to work for a lot of teen-agers is not lacrosse or volunteering on the Obama campaign or putting in a couple extra hours of study for the SAT. If you want to say that as a general rule we’d prefer to keep teen-agers away from work during the school year because we want to emphasize academic achievement, fine: But you should have the intellectual honesty to admit that you are simply elevating the interests of one group of young people over those of another. It’s a lot like the minimum wage: You may think that putting a floor on wages is worth the tradeoff of higher unemployment for low-skilled workers and permanent unemployment for the least-skilled workers, but you’re still making a trade. (And maybe you’re not the person best situated to judge the economic interests of people you’ve never met and about whom you know nothing?)

I'm not signing onto Gringrich's idea. But his was not a self-evidently damning statement.

I cited that comment just because it was relatively current. I agree that encouraging children to work in responsible ways is a good thing.

The point in citing it is how much of a loose cannon he is, saying stuff without either knowing or caring how damning it sounds, making blanket statements that can't possibly be borne out by reality, condemning whole segments of the population (you know, the people who will vote for him - or not) with his blanket statements.

But beyond his loose cannon approach to demagoguery, there are his bad policy positions and his personal conduct which will influence some.

I am of the opinion that we perhaps delve too much into the personal lives of our leaders who are, after all, flawed human beings with flawed relationships and flawed histories, but some of Newt's personal behavior just goes beyond the pale.

His castigation of Clinton for an affair AT THE SAME TIME he was having an affair is the sort of vile hypocrisy that most folk find distasteful in the extreme. And dumping one of his wives while she was in the hospital with cancer??

He won't make it to the end of the year, I predict. Now that he's the leader in the polls, the public will be reminded of his past positions and behaviors.

The point in citing it is how much of a loose cannon he is, saying stuff without either knowing or caring how damning it sounds, making blanket statements that can't possibly be borne out by reality, condemning whole segments of the population (you know, the people who will vote for him - or not) with his blanket statements.

I can certainly see how statements like this could harm him as a candidate because they can be so easily misconstrued.

His castigation of Clinton for an affair AT THE SAME TIME he was having an affair is the sort of vile hypocrisy that most folk find distasteful in the extreme. And dumping one of his wives while she was in the hospital with cancer??

Thanks for the clarification on the Newt/divorce story. I was operating on memory and the point I was getting to was that his personal life has been askew, which perhaps would not be so bad if it weren't for the hypocrisy of his prosecution of the Clinton affair.

And I'm still not sure from the story (and I don't really need to know too much) you reference, but wasn't the adultery going on during the cancer scare - and it was the adultery on Newt's part that led the wife to ask for divorce?

I'll probably vote for whichever crackpot the Libertarian Party nominates.

As the meme goes, the country is being run off a fiscal cliff at 65 MPH. Romney et al. promise to ease up on the gas a little bit. I want someone who will turn the car around. I want someone who will take a chainsaw to the federal budget. And that's the way that I'm going to vote.

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"An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a definite proposition... A contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says."
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